What I didn’t want to do is bounce back and forth between each scene. I noticed that sometimes I’d stay with a whole section for about 30 minutes or 40 minutes and then move to something. As long as I felt that it was compelling, as long as I had to get all the characters established and had to do that—I had to resist a lot of conventions that people were wanting.
That’s why I ask.
They were coming to me. I said, “No, I’m comfortable.” “Well, Kevin, nobody knows you’re in the movie.” I said, “They’ll get it. I’ll show up.” And I finally showed up, but I couldn’t do anything about that. I needed, number one, to wean the audience off knowing it’s just not going to be about me. It’s going to be about a lot of us, and I’m going to get my screen time. More of it’s coming in three and four. But I’m gratified that people were accepting these other characters. I could feel it. That they were inside that particular story.
Did you always know where your character would enter the movie, relatively late into the opening act?
Yeah. Actually, I came a little later [initially], so I have listened to people go, “Could you please come a little sooner?” And so I did. I moved myself up about 10 minutes. [Laughs] I try to listen, but sometimes it just doesn’t make sense to me.
It’s audacious to stay with certain sections as long as you do.
Yeah, the battle’s 45 minutes.
Did you think of yourself as doing something that was daring in that way?
No. I realized it was daring to some people, and I’m thinking—this conventional wisdom thing, it really kills me, because what if everybody’s wrong? Imagine we just stop talking right now. Be like, that was it, that was the interview. But if we’re talking for two hours, we might start to wane. But right now it’s like, “Look, as long as we’re really engaging…” I am really particular about the writing. If it doesn’t work in the writing, I can tell when it’s going too long.
How did you think about each of these stories? So many different characters in this Western backdrop are on their own paths, with their own dramas. What did they say collectively?
This promise of America, people were just moving towards it, and a lot of them were moving toward a myth. A myth that what exactly exists there. There’s a myth of maybe what actually happened there, in how these towns were formed. That was the point—to debunk the history. Like, “That’s not what happened at all.” What happened was, guys came and put stakes in the ground because back in Chicago, somebody knew a train may be coming through here. “I was going to make money in America, and it just disrupted the lives of thousands of people and spelled the death knell of a culture that had been there for 15,000 years because entrepreneurially, somebody goes, Train comes through here, we’re going to make money.”
